Was It An Inside Job?
Last week, The New York Times disclosed that GOP Presidential candidate Donald Trump suffered a $915.0 million loss in 1995. The tax deduction was so big that Mr. Trump could have avoided paying personal tax for the next 18 years.
But how did the New York Times get a hold of those documents?
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That’s a question which many people are asking. After all, Mr. Trump refused to release his tax returns during the presidential campaign, so these documents must have surfaced a different way. One of the four Times reporters who worked on the story recounted it in an interview, saying the documents came from Trump Tower.
“I wasn’t sure when I first saw it. I saw it was from the Trump Tower and I had just written a story a couple of weeks before on some of his business dealings and I thought either it was a love letter or potentially a complaint letter about the story. When I opened it the sheets were folded over, just once, and I unfolded them. I couldn’t believe it. I looked down and it was a 1995 tax return for Donald Trump and Marla Maples [his wife at the time], who had signed one of the forms, Marla Trump.” (Source: “Trump’s tax return and the anonymous envelope that landed in a Canadian reporter’s mailbox,” CBC, October 3, 2016.)
This bombshell was also included in the explosive Times piece. After getting the papers verified by the accountant who originally drafted them, the reporters decided to move ahead with the story. (Source: “Donald Trump Tax Records Show He Could Have Avoided Taxes for Nearly Two Decades, The Times Found,” The New York Times, October 1, 2016.)
One part in particular garnered a lot of attention: “The three documents arrived by mail at The Times with a postmark indicating they had been sent from New York City,” the article read. “The return address claimed the envelope had been sent from Trump Tower.”
Rumor mills have been spinning ever since this story came out. While no one can say for sure who leaked the documents, it seems logical that an insider was responsible. Only someone with access to Mr. Trump’s personal documents could have had access to the files.
These revelations have been viewed as harmful to the GOP Presidential candidate, but he insists there was no wrongdoing. In fact, Mr. Trump doubled down on his assertion that legal tax avoidance makes him smart. Here’s what he said on Twitter:
I know our complex tax laws better than anyone who has ever run for president and am the only one who can fix them. #failing@nytimes
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 2, 2016
So for now, all we know is that the person who sent the files did so from inside Trump Tower. But there’s still five weeks left until election day, and anything can happen in that time frame, including the unmasking of this informant.
